


A Birthday at the Barns

by angryplantbabe



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Birthday, Happy, also includes the other lynch brothers and henry cheng and opal lynch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 22:06:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7379197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angryplantbabe/pseuds/angryplantbabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The summer of his first year of college, Adam Parrish celebrates his birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Birthday at the Barns

**Author's Note:**

> A short little drabble because today, July 3rd, is the birthday of Adam Lizard Son Parrish, my pure, pure child, a sepia photograph of a boy. He turned 18 during The Dream Thieves, so this is his 20th! Here's to you, Adam.

Adam couldn’t see anything as he stumbled forward. Ronan’s hand was on his back, guiding his unsure feet across soft grass. The bandanna serving as his blindfold had been tied tightly around his eyes from the moment that Ronan picked him up from 300 Fox Way. Maura had offered the day before to give Adam a free birthday reading, which he’d agreed to after a heated discussion with Blue. Her insistence had surprised him at first, until Ronan showed up in his BMW.

“Get in, Parrish. Wait, actually, hold up. Put this on.” He held out the bandanna.

Reluctantly, Adam accepted the cloth. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll find out when we get there,” Blue said, in such a voice that there was no room for argument. 

Adam didn’t waste time asking  _ why _ he was blindfolding himself. He’d seen enough movies to know what a surprise party was, although he’d never had one himself.

Birthdays in the Parrish household had gone unnoted. His father hadn’t cared enough, and in any case, there were more important things to buy than a birthday cake. Once Adam started working, he splurged and bought himself a cupcake. He’d had to eat it at the store so that his parents wouldn’t find out, but he could still remember the taste of red velvet melting on his tongue.

Gansey, of course, had been horrified. Adam didn’t celebrate his birthday? How terrible! Gansey was going to throw him a party.

That had sparked their first big argument. 

Now, Adam didn’t protest. He didn’t think it was charity, not anymore. Not after he’d stayed up all night talking with everyone over the phone on Blue’s birthday, even though he had an essay due in two days. Not after last year, when he and Blue combined their graduation parties, and Ronan dreamed up all of the banners to save money, and Gansey paid for a caterer. That was how friendship worked; you took turns celebrating each other.

“We’re almost there,” Blue said.

He didn’t have to ask where  _ there _ was, as he already knew. As soon as he’d felt darkness descend over the car, he’d suspected. When grass poked around the edge of his sandals, and all he heard was the wind softly ruffling the leaves, and he  _ smelled _ the difference in the air, he knew he was home.

Voices reached his ear now. Gansey, taking charge; Declan, laughing with Matthew; Opal, shouting in Latin; Henry, asking politely when would Parrish arrive?

“He’s right here, asshole. Hold onto your panties,” Ronan drawled. His fingers fumbled with the blindfold’s knot. As they brushed against Adam’s bare neck, he felt electricity race up his spine.

The bandanna dropped to the ground, revealing a round table planted firmly in one of the Barns’s neater fields. Ronan’s dreamt lights illuminated the large, decadent cake in the center of the table. Two tiers, draped in golden icing, it was a thing of opulent beauty, almost certainly Gansey’s doing. Adam could already see a small pile of presents; he felt his throat tighten. All of this, for  _ him _ .

“There he is! Man of the hour.” Henry Cheng placed a welcoming hand on Adam’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Adam said, hesitating before giving him a grin. They’d conversed during his, Gansey’s, and Blue’s weekly phone calls from the road, to the point where they were friendly acquaintances. After everything that had happened with Glendower, whatever resentment he’d felt had gone, and they’d soon got along well. It was a slightly different thing seeing him in person, but Henry was still Henry, down to his effusive smile.

He shook hands with Declan and Matthew, who’d come down from DC to say hello. Matthew, thankfully, had survived his ordeal with the Unmaker, and had since split his time between his two brothers’ homes. Declan and Ronan got along better now; the older Lynch brother rubbed Ronan’s head with affection.

As Opal rushed Adam’s legs, he and Gansey knocked fists, and then hugged. “Happy birthday, man,” Gansey said, grinning widely. “I know you didn’t want anything big, so it’s just us.”

“Thank you,” Adam replied. He meant it, too, returning the smile with one of his own.

Evening bled into night as they demolished the cake, laughing when Opal stuck her face directly into the top tier. Then they settled down on the grass, Gansey pulling Blue and Henry close to him. Ronan’s knee pressed against Adam’s as he reached for the first of his presents.

Declan gave him another suit, a fancy number that was meant for political things. As a lawyer, he explained, Adam would need more than one suit, and he didn’t trust Ronan to pick something smart for his boyfriend. Ronan pelted Declan with the wrapping paper for that remark, much to Opal’s amusement.

Matthew got him a photo album. At his urging, Adam flipped through it to discover that some slots were already occupied. There was a single baby photo, bullied out of the Parrishes’ hands, but mostly they were from Gansey’s phone. Him in Cabeswater. Him and Blue. Him sitting with the others, laughing at something Noah had said. Tears budded in his eyes as he said thank you, hoarsely.

Poorly wrapped, Opal’s present stood out from the rest: a collection of stones, whichever caught her eye while she was exploring the Barns. Some were big, marble-like in texture, and some were simply sparkly. One or two seemed to pulse with an unnatural light, and Adam knew that they were dreamt as he clutched them to his chest. Now that he lived in a dream place, dream objects only awed, never startled.

A few weeks before he came back in May, Ronan offered to let him live in the Barns. There were certainly spare rooms, and Adam could save money for college instead of rent. It took a couple of days to mull over it, but eventually he agreed, and was glad of it. He drove Opal to her school, a private place recommended by Helen Gansey, driving Ronan’s BMW, making small talk with the other moms. When he came from work to pick her up, grease staining his hands, her smile lit up even the stormiest Henrietta afternoon.

Then Henry pushed forward, shoving his gift into Adam’s hands. Nestled in between a set of shiny, expensive wrenches was a gift card for a fancy Italian restaurant a couple miles from Henrietta.  “For you and Lynch,” Henry said with a wink.

Blue’s gift could not be mistaken for anyone else’s. She told him that she’d put it together during her year on the road, and he believed it. A planner, but made from repurposed canvas, as well as some wrapping paper, and some newspaper, painted in bright green. Stamps from Arizona and North Dakota and Maine plastered the covers; flowers and tea stains decorated the pages. It was recycled, it was weird, and it was so  _ Blue _ that Adam found himself smiling again.

Gansey got Adam a phone. “So you don’t have to ask your roommates to borrow one,” he said while Adam turned it on cautiously. It was true that relying on others was frustrating, especially given how often they all called. He supposed he could accept this, although he’d eventually take on the monthly bill. His second gift, though, shocked Adam- a Camaro wheel, the one they’d dredged up from a man-made lake two years ago. Adam, shocked, hugged Gansey fiercely. It was a piece of Gansey’s heart, and it was a promise of friendship. He could not imagine how strange and difficult it was to part with such a thing.

Once everyone else had passed out their gifts, Ronan stood suddenly. “All right, Parrish. Now it’s my turn.”

Ronan picked his way across the Barns, grinning wickedly at Declan as they passed his mud slick, to a corner of the property that Adam had never seen. Ronan brushed his hand against Adam’s, happier than he’d looked in a long time, and said, “You ready?”

Adam felt it before he saw it. A whisper in the back of his head, the caress of leaves against his arms. Then he focused on the trees ahead of him, and he knew what it was.

“Cabeswater?” he breathed.

Certainly it felt like it. The trees seemed to sway towards him, drawn by a strange bond. If he closed his eyes, he could already see himself walking through this miniature forest, despite the fact that he hadn’t set foot in it yet. It was only a fraction of Cabeswater, but it took his breath away.

When he glanced at Blue and Gansey, he saw they were speechless too, eyes brimming with tears.

“This is a prototype,” Ronan said by way of explanation. “I’m going to make it again, where it was before. But I figured you’d want a bit of it right here. At home. Opal can take care of it while you’re away, and-”

Adam rushed forward, grabbing Ronan’s biceps, and pressed his lips insistently against this fragile and beautiful boy, who dreamed forests for his boyfriend’s birthday, whose daughter still wore Adam’s dingy old watch, who offered his home and his heart to a boy from a trailer park.

Henry Cheng whooped. Adam didn’t care though, because all his life he’d never understood the hype around birthdays. Why should he, if he never experienced it himself? But already his mind was memorizing the details of this night, storing the feeling of it in his mind to take out on a rainy day.


End file.
